Midsea

Enchanted Orchard

Description:

Here is the background for the March 7th Adventure

Excerpt from Bex-My City
by
Lagermer the Limping Sage

The Enchanted Orchard lies on the other side of the Gnarl Mountains from Bex, providing lumber and fruit for the City of the Magic Towers and much of Midsea. The Mirbar Dwarves of the Gnarl Mountains maintain a tunnel connecting Bex to that mystical forest, charging a toll for the Fruit Vendors, Alchemists and Lumberjacks that pass between Bex and this strange landscape of secretive Wood Elves (Wodril) and hidden groves.

Over the past two hundred years many mages have experimented on these trees; producing special ingredients for their city’s ambitious alchemical creations. Because of this some parts of the Enchanted Orchard are no longer habitable, with carnivorous plants and poisonous fruits. Rumors of small villages run by the “Green Folk” and the “Mushroom Clan” are whispered about in the Moonshadow Tavern but these are unconfirmed.

This woodland existed long before the founding of Bex. The earliest record is recounted on an ancient half burned remnant of a scroll in the Elvenport Archives.

The pre-human scroll reads:

“and so the Elves of Feydril fled from Treerot and his Terrors by making a Covenant with the Conservators of Time. The Covenant allowed them to leave the Shattered Shores of the Twilight World in ships made of silver trees from the Endless Forest. The Feydril crossed the Firmament in their Silver Ships until they reached the Outer Edge of Midsea.

They found a flat world, inside a gigantic bubble of existence, where a Phoenix circled daily above land and ocean, around an arctic center: spiraling closer to the arctic during the Summer and flying further out from that frozen nexus in Winter.

Their first landfall was at the mouth of a river. They stayed a generation, recovering from the Terrors and then proceeded upriver leaving behind a hilltop fortress that would later become Al Baku. They again stopped where the river began to branch and built the Shining Keep by disassembling the fleet of silver ships.

This is where our Blessed and Cursed Elvenport now exists.

After a hundred years the Covenant required them to continue their journey into Midsea until they would be North of North at the Arctic Center of the World where they would stand ready to fight against the End of Time.

The Elves had divided by this time into the Urdril (City Elves) and Feydril (Keepers of the Covenant). The Urdril wanted to live in their newly founded towns and cities. The Feydril rejected this, leaving behind the Urdril, prophesying what the Urdril would gain in an Empire they would lose overnight by unleashing another Terror.

The Feydril, marched on and are said to have stopped at the Gnarls and planted many of the seeds they had from the Twilight World, so as to grow food for their last journey. Legend has it the Elves again split into those who followed the Covenant and those who wanted to break from its stringent doom. This new group, the Wodril (Wood Elves), wished to live amidst the splendor of their new trees: nursing them into another Endless Forest.

The Feydril, feeling the Call of the Covenant, left the Wodril like they did the Urdril. They warned the Wodril to guard against forcing abundance from the seeds they had sown like their ancestors did in the Twilight World, lest they awaken Treerot in the new world…”
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